The GnATTERbox

Want to talk about Sir Arthur Heywood's 15" gauge railways? About modern day minimum gauge lines? Have you found a minimum gauge line you've not seen mentioned on the website? Want directions to one of the railways that is mentioned? Whatever your interest in real minimum gauge lines, post your questions (and answer other modellers' questions) here.

Looking through the British Columbia Photo Archives I found an interesting Minimum Gauge tramway in the Queen Charlotte Islands (today known as the Haida Gwaii archipelago). The tramway was attached to the ore bunkers of the Ikeda Mine, supplied by a horse-drawn 36" gauge tramway.

The Queen Charlotte Islands are separated from mainland British Columbia by the extremely rough Queen Charlotte Sound and Hecate Strait. Even today barges are not recommended for transit to the archipelago and in the early 1900's barges were not used to transport ore across the straits. Small mines shipped their ore in sacks. Large mines needed a way to transfer their ore into the one or two bulk-loading holds of the local coastal passenger/freighters. The Ikeda Mine was the largest mine in the Queen Charlottes before World War I with a 1000 ton (or roughly 500 to 700 cubic yard) bunker.

The Ikeda Mine was owned by a Japanese fishing company and they used, for whatever reason, largely manual methods for almost everything. The ore has mined with picks and hand drilled explosives, the ore cars at the mine were hand-trammed, the ore was "concentrated" for shipment by hand-picking the ore, the 36" gauge flatcars with the sacked sorted ore were hauled to the shore by horses and the sacks were emptied into the bunkers by hand. To transfer the ore from the bunkers into the passenger/freighters there was a Minimum Gauge tramway that ran along both sides of the bunkers and then out to a folding platform where the ore was dumped into the ship holds. The mine was purchased by Vancouver interests around 1910 but plans to install a modern concentrator and locomotives were interrupted by World War I, although a steam winch and pneumatic drills were installed at the mine. The mine closed permanently shortly after World War I due to the economic recession.

The cars appear to be equipped with link & pin couplers for horse haulage or for use in small trains; this was an optional upgrade to these cars and may indicate eventual plans to mechanize the process.

According to the Mines Report of 1910 the bunker could be emptied in one 10-hour shift...using cars of between 1/4 and 1/2 yard capacity this means 1000 to 1500 car loads in 10 hours...roughly two cars tipped into the hold per minute for ten hours.